How Dark the World Becomes (36 page)

He looked at me for a moment, then tilted his head to one side.

“I had nothing to do with this decision,” he said at last with a sigh. “It was made long ago and far above me. It was a foolish decision, but that is not something you can say to certain people. Industrial concerns believed that the environment could be—altered, made more hospitable . . . to us. A terrible decision, in many ways.”

“Yeah, up to and including the fact that it doesn’t seem to be working. What made your eco-science guys think they could pull this off in the first place?”

He looked away and said nothing. And then I got it.

“Son of a bitch. You’ve done this before . . . with a similar protein group.”

“Nearly identical,” he said softly. “But
I
did not tell you that.” 

“Where?”

He turned and looked at me but again said nothing.

“Peezgtaan?”

“It was before we contacted you, before we knew the strain was remotely compatible with that of any intelligent race. The eco-form template was developed in the Peezgtaan project. By the time we had contacted you, discovered the similarities, the original project was complete.”

“Yeah. But K’Tok was just ramping up.”

“Considerable funds had already been invested.”

“Money talks and bullshit walks.”

His ears twitched in reluctant agreement. 

“But that means . . . aw, hell. That’s why AZ Tissopharm moved a shitload of humans to the Crack, isn’t it? To work the black farms. That was the plan all along. The mold spores are original form; if they were genetically altered, they’d be no good to you. So the mold proteins won’t kill us; we just die a little later of chronic pulmonary disease, or malnutrition, or just despair.”

He returned my look and answered carefully, ears motionless.

“As to that, I cannot say with certainty, but it is a reasonable conclusion.”

I looked at him for a while and then shook my head in disgust.

“Reasonable from people who, instead of belonging to the Elks or Moose or KC, join the Mystic Order of the Eternal Blood Jellyfish, or whatever the hell.” 

“Do not confuse the one with the other,” he snapped. “Your own world had the Skull and Bones, Illuminati, other secret societies to which men of wealth and power belonged. Is it not so?”

“Yeah, but where I came from, those were the
bad guys
.”

His eyes flickered away, his shoulders and ears sagged.

“Yes,” he admitted softly.

“So, which little sicko club do you belong to?” 

“I cannot say . . . will not say, at any rate. None of the things I have done concerning her”—and he pointed to Tweezaa—“or her brother, Barraki, have been at the command of any will but my own. These children are . . . not important to my brothers, only to me.”

“Why should I believe you?” I asked, and he immediately turned and looked me in the eyes.

“You should not. You are responsible for their safety. Believe no one. Trust no one,” he said firmly, and he meant it. It sounded like pretty good advice.

“What do you know about this
End of Empty Dreams
outfit?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he answered, turning away and shaking his head. When I didn’t say anything, he turned back and looked at me, saw I didn’t believe him.

“Do not be stupid, Sasha,” he said. “I know only that it is a Shadow Brotherhood. It is neither allied with nor an enemy of mine. Beyond that, I have only even heard its name once—perhaps twice—before. I know nothing else about it . . . because it is
secret
. You understand?
Secret
.”

“Well, he says they’re mostly centered inside AZ Crescent, and there’s some sort of messianic prophecy about end-times and the e-Traak blood line, and there’s a computer projection or something . . .”

“You should not be telling me this,” he said, turning away. “It violates the privacy, the sanctity, of his brotherhood.”

“Yeah, like I give a damn,” I answered.

He turned and looked me in the eye, and there was fear way back there behind everything else.

“If anyone learns you know this,” he said slowly, softly, and carefully, “or that you have told a member of another brotherhood, we will all die, Sasha. You and Dr. Marfoglia and the children will die quickly; that young fool and I will die slowly, but we will all die. Knowing that K’Tok is Human-friendly is a terrible thing, but if the truth is out, there is nothing to be done but face the consequences; knowing the name of his brotherhood is next to nothing; but knowing this other thing is death. Please,
never
speak of this again if you value the lives of the children.”

Most of the time, all you can do is guess at what’s going on in somebody’s head, but once in a while, the clock face falls away and you can see every gear and spring and flywheel, all going round and round, clear as high noon in the Crack, when the sun breaks the canyon rim way up there and the light floods everything, bouncing and sparkling off the turbulence of the river below the first spillway. 

Right then, for just that moment, I could look inside of
TheHon
and read him. 

He needed to know whether I would tell anyone else, because if I did, it would almost certainly lead to the death of Barraki and Tweezaa, and so if he thought that I would tell, he would try to kill me himself. He didn’t think he would succeed, but he would try, because their survival meant more to him than his own life. 

That was interesting.

“Dr. Marfoglia and I will never tell anyone else what we know,” I said. “I’ll make sure she understands.” 

He studied me for a few seconds, and then he nodded, satisfied.

“You people are really sick,” I said. 

He sighed and nodded, and looked away.

“Yes.”

We watched Tweezaa and the others play for a while in silence before I spoke again.

“What’s your interest in those two children?” I asked.

“You asked that once before, and I told you—”

“Yeah, you told me shit,” I said, cutting him off. “The children of an old flame? I believe it; I just don’t believe it’s enough to die for.”

“My interest in them is exactly the same as yours, Sasha.”

“Not likely,” I answered. “I’m getting paid.”

“Of course you are!” He laughed that creepy honk of a Varoki laugh, just like Arrie would have. “Both of us are,” he continued. “Both of us are
desperate
for our payment, my friend, are we not? And when they are finally safe, we will receive it in the only coinage for which we both truly hunger—redemption.”

I could have said something like
Speak for yourself, Bud
, but I didn’t. Instead we just sat together in silence for a while, watching the children play.

*   *   *

How and why did
TheHon
know about all those old secret societies back on Earth? The Black Hand holovids. 

That was the how. The why was more interesting. Leaving aside for a moment why anyone would make those pictures, why would a man of the education, sophistication, and stature of Special Envoy Arigapaa e-Lotonaa rot his brain watching them? Maybe more to the point, why were those holovids so popular as exports? Why did Varoki—apparently all of whom belonged to one secret society or another—love watching holovids where the good guys were trying to bring down the evil secret society?

You people are really sick,
I’d said. 

And he had agreed. 

Maybe deep down inside, most of them agreed. Well, so what? Tell a junkie the junk’s bad for him, like as not he’ll agree. Doesn’t mean he can walk away from it. 

Funny, those pictures always had the stock “good cultist” character—maybe a woman who falls in love with the hero, or a man who can no longer face the evil of his actions—who helps the characters escape, and who always dies in the end. That’s one way to find redemption, I guess. Was that the character the Varoki audiences related to—the one who turned against his or her own and found salvation in the grave? Or did they relate to the hero, who got to do all the righteous killing in the bloody ballet of slaughter which always consumed the last ten or twenty minutes of the story? 

Or maybe they related to the villain, who usually died as well but at least got most of the good lines. I guess it depended a lot on the viewer. Different strokes and all that. 

But here’s a good question for you—had those Black Hand filmmakers just
stumbled
onto the winning formula? Had the forces of the marketplace showered riches on the first filmmaker who simply got lucky, and then everyone else followed the money and the herd? Or did the filmmakers know something? Were they trying to tell their audience something? Maybe prepare them for something—their Human audience as well as their Varoki . . . perhaps prepare each of them for something different?

See? This is exactly how you start thinking after a couple days of being around a headcase like Katchaan. Everything is a conspiracy. But you know what Freud said: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and so by extension I guess you’d have to say sometimes a bad holovid is just a bad holovid. 

But when Katchaan disappeared the next day, I had to wonder. 

TWENTY-EIGHT

Marfoglia and I were supposed to meet Katchaan for breakfast, but he didn’t show up. Well, sometimes people are late, and sometimes things come up unexpectedly when you’re trying to keep a revolt ticking along smoothly. We were done eating and ready to leave when one of the Varoki insurgents came over to our table, introduced himself as a maintenance specialist—no name given—and asked to sit down. Katchaan, he explained, had been called away to oversee an equipment transfer and pickup near the uBakai colonial frontier. He didn’t volunteer who the equipment was coming from, and we didn’t ask. I gathered it was fairly high-tech stuff, which is why the technical advisor had to be present. 

Okay, swell. Thanks for the heads-up.

But he lingered for a while, wanting to pose a question but hesitant to do so. Finally, he overcame his reluctance.

“I hope that you will not find me forward in asking this . . . but I am very curious about something Mr. Katchaan spoke of . . . an organization known as
Tahk Pashaada-ak
?”

I’d already given Marfoglia the warning concerning loose talk, and so she looked at me as if she’d never heard of it before. But this didn’t feel right to me. Time for
maskirovka
—admit the little thing to cover the big thing. I looked back at her, and then I “remembered” something.

“Wait . . . yeah. Didn’t he say something like that when we were in the commander’s office two days ago?” I looked straight at Marfoglia when I said it, and she met my eyes for a moment, got it, and nodded. She wasn’t stupid. 

“Yes.
Tahk Pashaada-ak
. . . it means the End of Bad Dreams, doesn’t it?” she improvised, turning to the maintenance man.

“Empty Dreams,” he corrected her. “Or so I have been told,” he added hastily after a moment. “Did he tell you anything about the organization?”

We looked at each other, shrugged, looked back at him and shook our heads.
Ya nya znayu,
pal
. Ya toureest. Know where we can get a bacon cheeseburger around here?

After another ten minutes of us playing dumb, he eventually wandered away, satisfied that we were no threat to anyone. The secret was safe; no further action required.

After he left, we just sat there for a while, not saying anything, and I could feel prickly sweat collect on my forehead and upper lip. Marfoglia got the shakes pretty bad, and got this desperate, haunted look in her eyes for a moment until her defenses came back up like a drawbridge. 

The following day the security chief called Sergeant Gomez into his office and told him that, sadly, Mr. Katchaan had been killed in a government ambush. From that point on, Joe Security Chief would be his liaison. 

Right.

There wasn’t much to liaise, really. We had a section of the underground compound all to ourselves, and we pulled our own security—or the Marines and MPs did. I was retired again. Rations were as good as could be expected, the wounded were doing okay, and we had free communications with Gasiri and the transport overhead, provided it was by tight beam and so didn’t give away the position of the compound. Just to make sure, their comspecs controlled the uplink, and I’m sure they recorded all our conversations, but I could live with that. 

That didn’t leave us a whole lot to do but worry about how the war was going, wonder how long we’d be welcome here, and try to figure out just what the hell was really going on. That was Marfoglia and my department.

After another day of fruitless speculation, it finally occurred to me that maybe we were letting this Shadow Brotherhood thing mess with our brains too much. After all, if every brotherhood was that secret, then its influence on events had, by necessity, to be very subtle. You couldn’t act overtly without exposing the organization. So most of what happened had to happen for what we’d call rational reasons—if there’s ever anything rational about politics and war.

Okay, so pretend the whole
End of Empty Dreams
thing didn’t exist—which everyone else in the compound seemed pathologically intent on doing. Why was Katchaan even here in the first place? That was no secret; the commander had told us right at the start—he was their technical advisor. I figured out pretty quick what that meant—factory sales and service. He came along to make sure all the weapons worked, the comm gear was on line, spare parts and ammo were in the pipeline—in short, all the things that I’d figured an uBakai government liaison guy would handle, but he wasn’t from the uBakai government.

He was from AZ Crescent. 

“Okay,
consigliere
, explain how this makes any sense at all,” I asked Marfoglia the second day after Katchaan’s disappearance. Mostly I really wanted to know, but partly it was to give Marfoglia’s brain something to chew on instead of itself. She’d been jumpy, looked frayed around the edges, except when she had something to concentrate on. 

We sat at a table in their mess hall, but we’d run late for the midday meal and so had it almost to ourselves. Of course, even though they had a complete mess facility, most of their food was inedible to us, so we were still eating self-heated Marine ration packs—but at least we had plates and silverware.